Remote Materials Science PhD — AI Benchmark & Prompt Engineer

Weekday 1; United States; Remote; USD 80,000 - 113,000; Part time

Job summary

Mercor is hiring PhD and Master's scientists to author AI evaluation tasks for Sci Code. This fully remote role with a six-week timeline pays $70 per hour and partners with leading AI labs on a new benchmark for scientific computing.

You will source original materials, write prompts, and define grading criteria while calibrating against frontier models that challenge today's strongest systems.

Qualifications

• PhD in materials science or closely related field.
• Depth in semiconductor materials and molecular modeling.
• Proficiency in Python or R for scientific computing.
• Experience with Docker and GitHub pull-request workflows.

Responsibilities

• Source your own material: a published paper, a Kaggle dataset, an open-source repository, or a scenario you design.
• Write scientific prompts based on the input.
• Build the grading criteria that define a correct answer.
• Calibrate against frontier models — a task ships only when strong models fail it more often than they succeed.

Skills

Python

R

Git/GitHub

Docker

Education

PhD in Materials Science

Job description

Mercor is hiring PhD and Master's scientists to author AI evaluation tasks for Sci Code. This fully remote role with a six-week timeline pays $70 per hour and partners with leading AI labs on a new benchmark for scientific computing.

You will source original materials, write prompts, and define grading criteria while calibrating against frontier models that challenge today's strongest systems.